On March 5, a Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court in Pittsburgh ruled that Jason Altmire, an incumbent member of Congress, may be on the Democratic primary ballot. His petition was challenged, partly because one of his circulators allegedly didn’t live in the district. The judge ruled that the circulator does live in the district. See this story. That ruling side-steps the constitutional issue of whether petitioners need to live in the district.
The hearing in Rubin v Bowen, which had been set for March 6 in Superior Court in Alameda County (at the Oakland Courthouse) has been postponed until April 10. This is the case against the California “top-two” system (Proposition 14), filed by the Peace & Freedom Party, the Libertarian Party of California, and the Alameda County Green Party. It is the only case against any state’s top-two system that has been filed by minor parties exclusively, and which focuses on the exclusion of all but two candidates from the election itself.
This case should not be confused with the lawsuits Field v Bowen, and Chamness v Bowen, which attack two particular details of California’s top-two system: (1) no write-ins; (2) discriminatory policy on ballot labels. Chamness v Bowen is pending in the 9th circuit.
On March 5, the Georgia House passed HB 899, which contains all the Secretary of State’s election law recommendations except the provision lowering the number of signatures for minor party and independent candidates. The Macon newspaper story was correct. Representative Mark Hamilton was so resentful that one or two Georgia ballot access activists had been rude to him that he killed the provision lowering the number of signatures. The original bill, containing the Secretary of State’s recommendations, was HB 949, but all the contents of that bill, except the part lowering the number of signatures, were moved into HB 899, and that is the bill that passed the House today.
On March 6, the Maine Joint Taxation Committee will hold a work session on LD 1826, a bill to abolish Maine’s state income tax check-off that lets taxpayers choose to send a small donation to a political party. The Maine Green Party gets approximately half its funding from the state income tax check-off system.
A similar bill in Utah, HB 50, passed the House in January but has not made any headway since then. The Utah legislature adjourns for the year at the end of this week.
On March 2, the Virginia Senate passed HB 1151, which says that petitions for President and both houses of Congress should use the old 2001-2010 U.S. House district boundaries. President and U.S. Senate petitions are affected by U.S. House district boundaries because statewide petitions have a distribution requirement (400 signatures per U.S. House district are needed). Also presidential petitions must list presidential elector candidates and there must be one presidential elector residing in each U.S. House district.
